I was reading an article this morning about one 2020 presidential hopeful wanting to break up big tech companies to make competition more fair. While I can understand that perspective, I'm not sure how I feel about punishing companies simply because they were super successful.
What do you all think?
I think the notion of punishing a company is wrong. A company doesn't have feelings.
If a company is broken up for the good of the people, then it should be fine. After all, the company was made to provide services to the people.
Super successful can lead to monopoly behavior. Look at how many times they have been penalized for pushing their products and services only.
If I recall correctly EU penalized Google for:
So, I'd say that's fine because you need competition in order to maintain a healthy market balance.
Samuel Akintunde
Designer & Developer
I think it's a pretty good direction. It's not exactly punishment, it's just regulation. Left unchecked, these companies would get too powerful and become a monopoly.
Take Google for example, from Android to Gmail to Chrome to Maps. They are starting to own a very large share of access to most parts of our lives. Microsoft's decided to use Chromium in their browser now. The major browsers out there are Chrome and Firefox(sorry, Safari). How easy would you think it is for Chrome to just start rolling out standards they want developers to comply with? Very easy, I'd say.
It just isn't healthy, for everyone.